How Urbanhire CEO Benson Kawengian grew Urbanhire to $828K revenue and 168 customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is nathan camstra he's the co-founder and cio of a company called urbanhire.com nathan are you ready to take us to the top i am all right man tell us what the company does and what the revenue model is is it a peer play sas company yeah so urban hire at the moment is a um as a recruitment site focused on final funnel recruitment so rather than finding individual people matching to company needs they'll find a lot of people and funnel them down into um something that's a little bit more manageable for for bulk hiring okay and give me give me a use case where someone would be bulk hiring versus like high touch you know super curated yeah so uh bank tellers for instance you know you know you're going to have a certain amount of attrition at a bank uh and you want to make sure that you've got enough people human resources to to actually keep that covered and so you will probably have goals you know x amount for the per year and you'll just keep that in play all year round as you go through that typical amount of nutrition okay so when you look at your average customer paying you i mean how many jobs are they are they hiring through your system per year would you say you know it varies but uh you know i think a good example is you know around a hundred okay so it's pretty high volume yeah and what do they and again what's the revenue model so how are they paying for this you know typical kind of recruiter as you're paying a percent our first year salary some people are now doing sas what's your model yeah so this is uh it's it's a sas play for sure but um it's it's a bit of a subscription as well and then there are things like um assessments that can be added on as extras okay so what's the average customer pay for you per year for this kind of thing would you say yeah i mean that really varies greatly as well but um you know we've got we've got clients that pay you know upwards of ten thousand dollars we've got clients that pay as low as a hundred dollars we have three three thousand six hundred clients on the system not all of those are paying clients how many are paying so we've got 168 i think paying clients okay but in order for us to get um you know attraction as well as bring on people uh we open the system there's an aspect of the system that is is free and available to to anyone to use okay well i mean talk to me about what i know you have many different cohorts i don't want to talk about every customer cohort i mean would you say it's fair to say how the average customer maybe pays you a grand per year for these 100 hires or where would you say i mean it it definitely there's a huge curve right i totally get that yeah um so i i think the grand is probably a good a good use but you know that that's the model as it is i would really like to talk about those where we're going and why i'm actually part of the group now yeah nathan i wanted by the way i want to talk about where you're going but we first have established where you currently are right so that's what i'm trying to do in the first five minutes here so so just to be clear if someone's gonna if someone listening right now you know someone who runs a bank you know a company or someone who runs a restaurant that has high turnover wants to use you and they're going to end up making 100 hires over the next 12 months you're saying they're probably going to pay about a grand to make those 100 hires over the next year yeah and really the services that you have the different aspects of services that you have like assessments how complicated those assessments are you know what type of high touch do you really need okay so if a thousand bucks kind of per year is on the average and you got 168 right now i mean you guys are doing what a couple you know 14 000 ish per month something like that right now no actually we are at about we're by the end of the year we will be closing about a hundred thousand per month okay and what are you at today uh i i believe vincent would have been better for this one but i believe we're at around 69 okay okay got it so you're you know we've got about 35 40 days left kind of in the year so you're assuming that you're gonna get i mean if you're at 70 today you're assuming you're going to double over the next 40 days yeah we're on track to um to close business so it's it's a cyclical business um you know we've got uh clients that come in during cycles and you'll see that the the revenue growth if you look at the chart it you know it drops off at certain parts of the year and then goes goes back up at others when you look at okay so to avoid that seasonality if we just look at year by year growth if you're at 70 grand today per month where were you a year ago november 2017 [Music] uh a year ago i think it was less than 25 000. okay good so so good growth okay good so so this is helpful to understand kind of where the company is today again 168 customers last year about 25 grand per month and now today about 70 grand per month hoping to double that over the next 45-50 days because you close a lot of business in the last quarter it sounds like um and put this on a timeline for us when did you guys launch the company uh they launched it in 2016. okay you said they launched it so when did you join so i i joined this year okay to take the company in a new direction and and are you i mean are you generally viewed as a fountain like how many people are on the team are you viewed as a founder i'm viewed as a founder um there are you know the company consists of 40 people at the moment okay uh we'll probably get to 50 by early next year okay and and what prompted kind of them saying hey we need to bring a guy like nathan in well so a couple things one is that you know the company's growing everybody's very excited about the growth but we wanted to take a look and see what what can we what can we do this to make this a billion dollar company yeah what can we really do to get more investment to make this this huge and um you know was it focus on recruitment make more features in the recruitment space or do we need to take a wider look and see in the hr space how how we can invest in order to to make this a much larger company mm-hmm i show you bootstrap today or if you raise capital so we at this point we've raised capital we we've had um a seat round so how much have you raised today total so as of today i want to say that they raised 125 oh i'm sorry one point yeah 1.2 million okay and most that was equity or convertible note or debt that was equity there's a few different um few different investors including kk funds out of uh out of singapore okay and where are you guys all based by the team of 40. oh it's all all indonesia okay very good yeah you as well yeah that's great okay so now that we have a baseline kind of where you're at today to help us understand where you're going yeah yeah absolutely so i had 17 plus years at aeon um building hris platforms uh so us-based large-scale to global large-scale hris platforms that included broken um you know benefits administration just basic hrms and so i left a on this let's see last year and and really did some soul searching to see what i wanted to where i wanted to go next what i wanted to do and ultimately i had a lot of things my in my the last job i i was asked to really think beyond our current revenue models and find out how we could even disrupt some of the revenue models that we traditionally relied on for a very long time and um you know because companies at this point you know especially you know companies as large as and they're they they're they're in a buy mode they're not going to build something i was a little bit concerned that if i went back into the industry in the large scale company that i wasn't going to be able to achieve some of the software goals that ultimately i wanted to achieve some of the changes to the broking industry and the um in the hrs industry so what i did is focus on finding a platform which had uh uh which had an end of a baseline and was in the hr tag field that could then be converted into um you know what my what my vision is so i met benson and he had the same benson's the ceo benson is the ceo and um so we you know we talked over about eight months and i came out i assessed the platform and so we came to a conclusion that from the platform we've got we can now build this into a a really large scale but focused on indonesia at the moment hrs platform that would be benefits delivery with a um you know would be a sas model but at the same time there's a huge potential for broking revenue out of that model as well okay all year 70 grand per month today is sas revenue though correct correct yeah okay and and i mean how sticky is this so what does churn look like today well that's that's it's difficult because we sign up clients for you know for a year at a time yeah so then you say okay how...